Yenya's World

Fri, 30 Mar 2007

The Best of 2006

OK, so the AnimeReactor Community Awards for 2006 have been announced. As I had expected,
Haruhi won the most categories,
and I hereby declare it the winner of my personal category
The most overhyped anime of the year 2006. How does my own The
best of 2006 look like?

The Best Overall

Definitely Eureka Seven (which has
not even been nominated in this category by ARC awards jury). Altough I have
not seen Mushishi yet.

As for the later part, Eureka
Seven. As for the former, maybe Noein (altough I have not seen all eps
yet). I have also seen Starship
Operators, which is excellent (and underappreciated), but it is older than
2006.

Best Thriller/Mystery/Horror

Higurashi looks promising so far, and I
have not seen anything else from this genre.

Best Male Character

I would say Holland from Eureka
Seven. Maybe Archer from Fate/stay night
as well. Why often supporting characters are more interesting for me than the
leading ones?

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Thu, 29 Mar 2007

Order of the Stick

Have you ever played a fantasy role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons[?] (or a local variant
Dračí doupě)? And did you enjoy it?
Then you may want to have a look at the
Order of the Stick,
a quite funy web comics, which takes place inside the RPG. The image
is taken from the
OotS cast page.

5 replies for this story:

The users who had read OotS also enjoyed:
http://www.thenoobcomic.com/daily/strip001.html
(More about online RPGs and their specialties rather than DnD in general. Watch out for the hordes of generic evil creautres!)

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Wed, 28 Mar 2007

Without Qmail

Two weeks ago I have moved linux.cz mailserver and listserver from
Qmail and
EZMLM to
Postfix and Mailman. So far I have mixed impressions from this move:

On the positive side:

Postfix can reject mail inside the SMTP session, so we are not sending
delayed bounces anymore. Thus our average mail queue size is down to about
500 mails, while it has been between 50k and 100k messages with Qmail.

I have installed ClamAV antivirus,
and it apparently catches some malware, which passes through the university
relay (even though they run a commercial antivirus software on it).

Probably because of the lower mail queue length, the peak throughput
of the mailserver went from about 1200 messages per 5 minutes (a daily maximum)
to almost 2400 messages per 5 minutes (also a daily maximum). I don't think
Postifx is that much faster itself.

The gateway from our listserver to the usenet news works again - setting it
up has been a matter of few clicks to the Mailman web interface. Nice!

As you can see, the positives are mostly related to Postfix. On the other hand,
the negatives are mostly related to EZMLM to Mailman move:

The loop detection is not even remotely as good in Mailman as it was
in EZMLM - the first day after the move we had a mail loop in the Docbook list,
which we have stopped after maybe 1500 mails.

Mailman tends to overreact to the list members, whose MTAs reject spams
or viruses in the SMTP session: the resulting bounce leads to the suspended
membership, probe messages, and many other kinds of annoyances. With VERP[?] the situation seems to be a little better, but subjectively it is still
worse than with EZMLM, which has been almost maintainance-free.

Our Nagios several times a day warns me that the FTP service running on the same host is in the "critical" state. When I check it up, it looks prefectly OK.
I suspect that the load peak when distributing a message to our biggest list, or something like that (Wietse Venema's overuse of fsync(2) maybe).

Mailman is programmed in Python! Apart from few very basic tasks,
which have their standalone commands, everything other has to be done in Python.
It even does not have the text-based or SQL-based data storage,
and it stores everything in Python "pickles" (which as I understand it is
something like Perl's Storable). Bleeeh.

Pipermail (the Mailman default web-based frontend to the list archive) sucks. I need to get some time to connect my own web-based archive, which I have used with EZMLM) with mailman.

Maybe I am doing something wrong, because I don't think I have these problems
with other Mailman-based lists I am member of. Need to get some sample settings
which other list owners use somewhere.

1 replies for this story:

Thanks for mail2news gateway. I don't understand, why people prefer e-mail to good old nntp...

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Tue, 13 Mar 2007

Shipping Now!

I wanted to buy something at patro.cz (a
local e-shop), and after placing an order I have received the acknowledgement
mail, informing me which parts of my order are available immediately
and which ones will be available later:

Následující zboží jsme schopni expedovat ihned:

1 x Poštovné

1 x Balné

in English:

We can ship the following parts immediately:

1 x Shipping fee

1 x Packaging fee

I have sent them a reply telling them it is OK to ship both fees now and the
thing I ordered later :-)

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Mon, 12 Mar 2007

Greylisting Statistics

The postmaster of the muni.cz domain has finally enabled
greylisting on the central muni.cz relay. About two weeks ago
for our faculty subdomain, fi.muni.cz, a week ago for
the linux.cz domain as well.

The above graph shows the number of open outgoing SMTP connections
at linux.cz mailserver. It is nice to see it constantly
decreasing in the last week (yes, qmail's delayed bounces
areevil).

As for my personal mailbox, yestedays monthly rotate of the spambox revealed
that I had slightly above 50 000 spams last month, which is a 50% drop
from the previous month. Given the greylisting has been active for two weeks
only (or a single week for linux.cz), the real number is somewhere
around 75-80%. Not bad, isn't it?

2 replies for this story:

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Tue, 06 Mar 2007

Notify in Advance

For a long time we have planned to migrate our
Faculty web server to Apache 2,
getting rid of the aging Apache 1.3 + charset conversion module (do you
still remember the time when browsers could handle just one character set
- the one native on the system they ran under - and the web server had
to recode the documents (and CGI script outputs and many other things)
to match the expected charset of the client?).

Because of the new Apache, some configuration directives have changed
(including the ones users use in their .htaccess files).
So we first made the Apache 2 running in parallel with 1.3 (on
a different port), so that users can test whether their pages would work
even under the new Apache. Three weeks or so before the upgrade we
have sent the in-advance notification to users, where we have pointed
out the most common directives which are no longer valid in Apache 2,
told the users that they can test their pages on the different port,
and stated the expected date of a switchover.

Few days before the upgrade we have sent the similar notification again,
and put an announce to the electronic noticeboard in our
Information system.
Last Thursday we have finally switched the webserver to Apache 2 as expected.

Guess what happened:
even today, 6 days after the upgrade, users keep calling or mailing: "my web
pages do not work, did you do something to the web server by chance?".
When I point out that they got two e-mails from us, they are simply not aware
of it (in one case I even grepped the user's mailbox for the
appropriate Message-Id, and of course, the announcement message
was still sitting in this user's mailbox). What should I do with users who
do not even bother to read an e-mail from us and then complain? One would expect
that users at Faculty of Informatics should not display the same levels
of lameness as ordinary users...

3 replies for this story:

My experience with Emacs updates suggests: 1. don't worry about students, they can handle it; 2. you can't avoid complaints from the faculty staff, many people ignore all warnings until the problem actually arises; 3. offer making the necessary conversion yourself for those who complain, it's cheaper than having discussions and then doing it anyway; 4. if possible, keep running the old Apache version elsewhere until it dies and redirect pages of the users who don't want ever change anything there (it may be easier than solving 2.+3.; BTW when I did this with Emacs, I had to walk around offices of those users and make one-line changes in their profiles accordingly because they were unable to do that themselves).

wrote:

I don't read the IS noticeboard regularly but i remember reading about that - i just wasn't caring since there was time.
I noticed my web isn't working yesterday. OK, maybe i'm just another lame, but i haven't received any mail. I have my fi.muni.cz mail forwarded to mail.muni.cz (i've just double checked that i have .forward file in my home dir with the right adress - all made by fadmin and then manually checked). The mail is neither in IS mailbox nor on aisa.
The only info i've found about this was on your page. (and yes - i know how to google :})
I wish you less complaining lame users...

Maybe you are not a member of FI staff or PhD student (our notifies has been sent to fi@fi, which includes only the above two categories. Anyway, my rant has not been directed to senior FI professors (provided that they do no try to accuse us of breaking the web server) neither to the students (we did not sent them mail personally, and we hope they know how to handle this problem). The main target of my rant were _some_ PhD students, who neither read our announcements, nor they even try to be polite when reporting the apparent problem (unlike, interestingly enough, _some_ professors).

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Mon, 05 Mar 2007

Japanese Numbers and Times

The topic of recent Japanese lessons was dates, time, and numbers.
I found that even though I can say the numbers properly, I am very
slow with it,
as I always have to count from 1 to the desired number to find the right
word :-(. So I have decided to write computer-based selftests for Japanese
numbers, dates, and time.

For a long time I wanted to get know the applications
for self-tests in our Information system.
Japanese selftests were a good excuse to learn this agenda.
The tests
are available for anyone logged in to the IS MU. Click to the green icon
to the left of the ".qdesc" file, and choose "Click to work
with ROPOT." ("Zodpovědět odpovědník" in Czech).

As a side effect, I put the code for converting integers to Kanji and Hiragana
to a separate module, so when I get some time to package it, I will upload
it to CPAN, probably as
Numbers::Japanese or something similar.